Make-up designer Michael Westmore based Tosk's make-up upon the picture of an alligator he saw in Smithsonian Magazine.
The story of this episode was inspired by the 1924 Richard Connell short story The Most Dangerous Game.
The concept of an alien species that hunts other sentient beings for sport would go on to be reused to develop the Hirogen, a Delta Quadrant-based species who appears in Star Trek: Voyager (1995).